New Improved and Easier to Use Firefox 4 Beta for Android and Maemo

We are excited to release the newest Firefox 4 Beta for Android and Maemo. The beta is now available in the Android Market, which you can find by opening the Market application on your phone and searching for “Mozilla Firefox.” The Maemo builds are available for download here . This beta release is not feature or performance complete, but with the help and feedback from our community of testers we’re building an amazing browser. (Note: To ensure smooth updates, we ask existing beta users on Android to please uninstall previous Firefox betas before installing this release.)

With Firefox on mobile devices, we aim to offer an effortless and optimized experience, while also solving the pain points of mobile browsing. Based on feedback from beta testers, we made a number of changes to the look of Firefox 4 Beta, made discovery of add-ons easier, added the ability to save websites as PDFs to read later, fixed some keyboard issues and included support for complex scripts such as Arabic and Persian (on devices with the appropriate fonts). You can find more details on the user experience updates from Lead UX Designer, Madhava Enros.

We design Firefox on mobile devices to minimize typing because typing on phones is difficult and time consuming. Firefox 4 Beta for Android and Maemo now has support for “copy and paste” in the URL bar. We also simplified the setup process for Firefox Sync to reduce the amount of typing needed to securely access your browsing history, bookmarks, tabs and passwords from your desktop to your phone, making it easy to get to (and even log in to) any site with minimal typing.

We continue to focus on performance, responsiveness and usability in future releases and have a lot more to come for graphics, JavaScript, add-ons and more.

Feedback from our beta testers is extremely useful in fixing bugs and making improvements to Firefox 4 Beta. We keep a close eye on the feedback people submit and watch the crash report data closely to ensure that we continue to improve stability over the previous betas.